With it’s two small bedrooms, living room, kitchen, and bathroom, it wasn’t much bigger than a garage.

     Yet I don’t think any of the children really felt deprived growing up in such a cramped space.

     JERMAINE: To me, small is beautiful. Sharing a small house is one of the reasons why the Jacksons are a close family today.

     The simple mathematics of our living situation -- eleven human beings, a two-bedroomed house -- made us a curiosity in the neighborhood. Joe’s co-workers at Inland Steel were fascinated by the size of our family, too.

     “Joe, you’ve got so many kids you probably have to sleep in shifts,” they’d tease.

     So how did we fit nine kids and two adults in a tiny home? It sounds like a riddle, doesn’t it?

     The answer: with a little ingenuity.

     The boys got one of the bedrooms. We bought a triple bunk bed for them. Tito and Jermaine slept in the top bunk, Marlon and Michael in the middle one, and Jackie in the bottom. So they’d have a little bit of privacy, Tito and Jermaine and Marlon and Michael would lie on different ends. When Randy was old enough, he slept on the second couch in the living room.

     JERMAINE: Sharing a room with my brothers was the greatest. We’d talk at least an hour together before going to sleep. We would all be in our bunks, and we wouldn’t even have to look at one another to hold a serious conversation.

     Joe and I got the other bedroom. It was just big enough for a bed, dresser, and chest of drawers. When we had a baby, we somehow managed to squeeze in a bassinet, too.

     The girls slept on a fold-out couch in the living room. Rebbie, in fact, never had her own room.

     REBBIE: A girl I knew across the street shared a bedroom with her sister. I used to think, Wow! That must be nice having a bedroom that’s half your own. But I never regretted not having my own room. My attitude was, Well, I have something my friend doesn’t have: the love of my mother.

     On occasion, Rebbie did get to sleep in my bedroom. When Joe worked the swing shift -- and he often did to earn the extra dollar an hour -- she and LaToya would pile in the bed with me. “I’m sleeping with Mother” I’m sleeping with Mother!” they’d exclaim. Sometimes one or two of the boys would, too, even though I had only a double bed.

     Having only the one bathroom meant the imposition of “The Fifteen-Minute Rule” in the morning. If someone -- usually Jackie -- was in the bathroom longer than that, he’d hear about it from his brothers.

     One bathroom also meant shared baths. When Jackie, Jermaine, and Tito were young, I’d bathe them together.

     Michael and Marlon were also bath mates. When they were three or four, respectively, they starred in my favorite bathtub story. One summer night I couldn’t locate them as I was filling the tub. Thinking that they were outside playing, I went and called for them. But they weren’t outside, either. Concerned, I returned to the house to look around again. They were still nowhere to be found.

     Finally, I poked my head into the bathroom. To my relief, that’s where I found them. They’d entered the bathroom when I was outside looking for them, gotten into the tub -- and fallen dead asleep.

     Our kitchen would have been cramped even if we didn’t have our chrome dining room table and chairs in there. Eventually I had the wall separating the kitchen from the utility room knocked out to give me more room to maneuver.

     Our living room was just large enough for our two couches, two chairs, TV, and stereo.

     As for our garage .... we didn’t have one. That meant in wintertime Joe had to scrape ice off the windshield of his Buick every morning.

     There was another riddle to our life at 2300 Jackson Street, and it went like this: How does a big family make do on a small income? And I mean small. I remember looking at Joe’s earliest weekly paychecks from Inland Steel and seeing that it was in the amount of fifty-six dollars. The answer, of course, was that Joe and I cut every corner we could.

     For our first five years in Gary we didn’t even have a telephone. A neighbor, Margaret Penson, was kind enough to let me make and receive calls on her phone.

     Going out to dinner and the movies was out of the question. We did finally manage to buy a television on the weekly installment plan in 1953, and the TV became our main form of family entertainment in the evening.

     Most of our money went toward the necessities: clothes and food.

     I made some of our clothes myself: mainly shirts for Joe, and sister-and-brother outfits for Rebbie and Jackie when they were little. When I shopped it was usually at the Salvation Army.

     I’d walk over there many a morning in the spring and summer through the latest donations. Sometimes Jackie, Tito, and Jermaine would come with me. I enjoyed their company, but I liked having their fast legs even more; the first people through the door got the best selection. With my limp, the other ladies would fly by me, so I depended on the boys to get to the “new” shirts and pants first.

     JERMAINE: Of course, sometimes we’d run right past the clothes section and go upstairs, where all the sports equipment was kept.

     Hand-me-downs were a fact of life. I recall one particularly well-worn coat, a cute little Chesterfield with a brown-velvet collar, and a cap with a snap under the chin. Originally it belonged to one of the sons of my sister-in-law’s sister-in-law. After he outgrew it, Jermaine got to wear it. When Jermaine outgrew it, I gave it to my sister-in-law so one of her sons could wear it. When he outgrew it, I got it back for Marlon.

     As for food, we grew what we could ourselves. Our garden was located on a lot that my stepfather owned in Gary. Joe did the planting and I did the picking.

     We also bought directly from farmers in nearby Crown Point. Joe, our oldest children, and I would pick what we wanted: pears, corn, string beans, and many other vegetables. It was fun. What wasn’t fun was all the shucking and canning that the kids and I would have to do. Just the sight of a canning jar or freezer bag would make Rebbie sick to her stomach.

     Of course, we also shopped at the grocery store. I bought the staples -- flour, cornmeal, yeast, sugar, eggs, rice, and beans -- and made our meals from scratch. After we bought a freezer, Joe would also try to get a good buy on a side of beef for the winter.

     We ate simply. One of the kids’ favorite foods for lunch were rolls dropped into deep fat and fried. The children would shake the rolls in a bag with sugar, then eat them with tomato soup. Another lunch staple was egg sandwiches. A dozen eggs yielded enough egg salad for everyone.

     For dinner, mackerel croquettes with rice was popular. I couldn’t afford salmon.

     For desert, we’d splurge on homemade peach cobbler, sweet-potato pie, and the kids’ favorite: fried apple pie.

     Usually we had enough food on hand. But there were some close calls.

     REBBIE: As many a payday rolled around, food was a scarce commodity in our house. More than a few times we would come home for lunch on dad’s payday, only to find the cupboard bare. Sometimes, we’d spend most of our lunch hour waiting for dad to return after chasing his check. Somehow, he always made it home before we had to return to school on empty stomachs. He’d hand us some cash, and we’d run down to the corner store to buy that wonderful loaf of fresh Wonder Bread, and a package of lunch meat. And we would get to eat.

     Sometimes, however, there wasn’t a payday to bail us out. From time to time Joe was laid off.

     We could have gone on welfare, but I would rather have scrubbed floors and Joe would rather have picked potatoes -- which is exactly what he did when he was out of work. We’d eat potatoes every which way: backed, stewed, fried, and boiled.

     During crunch times we weren’t above sticking our hand between the cushions of our couch and feeling for change that someone might have dropped. Once, when there was no food in the house, we found a quarter, enough to buy a loaf of bread.

     Groping for lost change is one of my more poignant Gary memories. I have several others, each tied to the fierce Gary winter.

     Our house was poorly insulated. Our only protection from the cold was a little space heater and, later, a furnace. And our oven. On particularly cold nights, you could find the kids and me in the kitchen, with the doors closed, sitting in front of the oven. It was the warmest spot in the house.

     Jermaine hated to venture into the freezing cold so much that he’d occasionally pull a ruse to stay home from school -- a ruse I didn’t find out about until just recently.

     JERMAINE: After walking out the front door, I would simply go to the back of the house, climb in the window that I’d just opened in our bedroom, and spend the day sleeping, reading, and eating candy in our closet. Sometimes, Tito would join me. It beat freezing to death walking to school.

     The children weren’t anymore thrilled about Joe and me leaving the house in winter.

     When Joe worked the early shift at Inland Steel, they’d always wake up at four A.M. to the sorry sound of Joe’s Buick heating up outside.

     After I took my job at Sears in the late fifties, Jackie would stand glumly at the window as I left in the morning.

     JACKIE: Tears would come to my eyes as I watched my mother walk down the street, braving the bitter cold and the snow. I’d follow her with my eyes as long as I could, hoping that she wouldn’t slip and fall.

     Not all of my winter memories are poignant ones, however. After a snowfall, Jermaine and Tito would take their shovels door to door, offering to clear off walks and driveways. They’d contribute their earnings to the family pot, and the money would buy us dinner for several days. Because I couldn’t hang out the wash in winter, the older boys would transport it to the laundromat on their sled and dry it there.

     My children’s help wasn’t limited to the winter. Each of them did his or her part around the house year-round to help the Jackson family get to the next day, the next week.

     While the Jacksons crammed a lot of love into our too-small house, Joe and I lived in fear of the dangers that lurked outside our door.

     Shortly after we moved to Gary, we heard that a boy had been stabbed to death in a bathroom at Roosevelt High School, which was located just around the corner from us. From then on, we were haunted by the tales of Gary children going bad: fighting, taking drugs, getting girls pregnant.

     We constantly worried about raising our children in such an environment. If we didn’t feel right about who we saw hanging around in the park behind our house, we wouldn’t permit our children to play outside. When we did let them out, one of us would keep an eye on them from the house, always alert for signs of danger.

     As important as it was for us to keep our kids physically separated from bad influences, we knew that the only way to bring them up right. I found special inspiration in teaching from Proverbs: Raise your child the way you want them to go, and when he grows up he won’t depart from that path.

     To me, bringing my kids up right meant, first and foremost, letting them know that they were loved . I suspected that Gary’s teen-aged toughs were striking out in anger, in part because they didn’t get the love they needed when they were growing up.

     Even though it was hard for us to make ends meet on Joe’s paycheck alone, I don’t regret not going to work myself until after Michael was born, and then working only part-time. I don’t believe that there is any substitute for a mother’s full-time care during a child’s first years. I made a point of spending time with my kids every day, showing them in words and hugs how much they meant to me.

     I also believe it’s important that parents allow their children to live at home as long as they wish to. “I’ll be glad when my kid’s eighteen -- I’m throwing him out,” I’ve heard parents say. My attitude is : Why do you want him to leave? Let him stay. He doesn’t have to be a baby -- he can still be independent. One of the reasons the world is the way it is today, I feel, is because parents want their children to become independent too early in life. The children don’t know how to handle their freedom, and they get into drugs, robbing, stealing, and killing. As for me, I would have been content if my kids would have stayed with me forever. I’m just a mother who overly loves her children.

     But a mother’s care, I knew, was not enough to ensure that my children would stick to “the path” as they grew up. So Joe and I also worked to instill in our kids a love of God, as well as a respect for authority -- ours.

     With religion I took the lead.

     I’ve always felt close to God. Even as a young child I said my prayers every morning, always thanking Him for giving me a new day. It wasn’t until 1960, however, that I found a religion that I felt I could devote my life to, a religion that has filled my life with an underlying sense of peace to this day.

     It all started with a knock on my door. The visitor was a field worker with the Jehovah’s Witnesses.

     In a way I had been waiting for that knock for fourteen years, ever since as a twelve-year-old I was invited by my next-door neighbors to sit in on a Bible lesson taught by a Witness. I learned more about God in that one lesson than I had in all my Bible studies to that point. I was especially interested in what the teacher had to say about death, taking us to the Bible to back up the Witnesses' claim that when man dies he knows and feels nothing.

     Well, you know how excited children get. I went home that day, exclaiming, “Mother, there’s no such thing as hell, burning for ever and ever!”

     But my mother didn’t want to hear it. “That’s not true, "she said, “and I don’t want you to study there.”

     After that I began searching. I had already had a bad experience in the Baptist church that my mother and I attended: The congregation learned that our minister was having a relationship with a woman who lived across the street from us. Half of the congregation stayed with the minister; the other half, including my mother and me, started a new Baptist church.

     After Joe and I got married I began attending a Lutheran church with my children. But I learned that the pastor there was guilty of the same transgression as my former Baptist pastor. "I don’t want to follow some leader who’s doing wrong himself,” I said to myself in disgust. “I have to find a religion that takes God’s Word more seriously.”

     So when I opened my front door and saw the Witness on my porch, I was respective. I invited her in.

     That first day, she, Joe, and I talked for an hour. What especially impressed me was the fact that, like the teacher had done fourteen years earlier, she took us to the Scriptures to back up each statement she made. Among the subjects we discussed were the Witnesses’ belief in the approaching Armageddon, and the need for believers to be teachers like Jesus, taking the Word from door to door. At the end of the meeting, Joe and I agreed to begin Bible studies in our home.

     Ironically, my teacher originally thought that Joe would be converted before me. Joe was enthusiastic and we would go out together in "field service,” the term Witnesses use for taking the Word from door to door. But one day he stopped his studies. “I’m not really ready,” he explained. I accepted that. Becoming a Witness is an obligation, and it wasn’t right for Joe to get baptized if he wasn’t willing or able to commit himself fully.

     I, however, pursued my studies with diligence. In 1963, three years after the first visit from the field worker, I was finally baptized. My baptism took place in the swimming pool at Roosevelt High, which the Witness had had rented out for the Assembly.

     The good thing about Joe’s getting involved to the degree that he did is that he understood what the Jehovah’s Witnesses are all about. So he not only supported my baptism, but also made a decision to expose Witnesses’ teaching to our children. I did that by conducting the Bible studies in our living room, as well as by encouraging the children to accompany me to meetings at Kingdom Hall. But I was careful not to force the religion on them. When they were older I wanted them to come in because they wanted to be Witnesses.

     However, regarding the Witnesses’ belief the Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving, and Halloween are pagan holidays, I felt that I had to go with the teachings in our household. With Christmas, especially, that amounted to a big change for us.

     Like many families, a Christmas tree, presents, and a big meal had been a tradition in our house. I would stay up all night Christmas Eve preparing supper. I would cook a turkey with all the trimmings, a ham, collard greens, string beans, macaroni and cheese, salad, and, for desert, sweet-potato pies and Joe’s favorite: banana-nut cake. I would usually still be in the kitchen at five A.M. Christmas Day, when the kids would wake up and come running into the living room to open their presents.

     While we continued to celebrate Christmas in a scaled-down way for several years, the children understood that in the future they would get fewer and fewer presents. Finally one year I informed them, “This year we're not going to have a tree, we’re not going to exchange gifts, we’re not going to celebrate Christmas in any way.” They were good about it, because by then they had begun to get interested in the teachings of the Witnesses.

     As for establishing a sense of parental authority in our home, I can summarize Joe’s and my attitudes in a few words: I was strict; Joe was stricter.

     I got my strictness from my mom. She made rules for Hattie and me to follow that at the time struck us as downright mean. Chief among them was her rule that we be home from our blue-light dances no later than ten P.M. If we weren’t back on time, we’d look up at ten-fifteen or ten-thirty and see her standing there. “Why aren’t you home?” she’d demand in front of everyone.

     “Oh my goodness, we forgot,” we’d say meekly, whether we had to or not. We’d be so embarrassed.

     However, turn the calendar ahead to when it was time for Joe and me to lay down our rules for our kids, and we were even stricter than my mother had been -- setting a nine P.M. curfew. However, I was flexible. If it was a warm summer’s night, and the kids just wanted to stay outside, I’d let them -- as long as I was outside, too, sitting on the porch or visiting with a neighbor.

     As a disciplinarian, my main message to my kids was: “I will treat you with respect. I will not yell at you or threaten you. All I ask for in return is for you to treat me with respect.” One thing I can’t stand is a sassy child.

     REBBIE: I was fifteen at the time. Mother and I were moving our washer from the service porch into the kitchen next to the sink. She kept telling me, “Push! Push! Push!” I was pushing as hard as I could, and, in a moment of exasperation, I finally blurted out, “What do you want me to do -- push it through the sink?!

     Well, she smacked me so fast for saying that.

     Nowadays when you spank a child a little bit too much, the public calls it child abuse. However, I favor corporal punishment -- even for a fifteen-year-old. God knows that when I misbehaved as a teen-ager, my mother didn’t hesitate to take me to woodshed.

     I believe that children should be made to fear misbehaving, to think, If I do this, or don’t do this, I’m going to have to answer to my mother and father.

     As it turned out, I didn’t have to spank my children very often. Usually they were good around me, and, since I have a mild temper, anyway, it took blatant misbehavior to get me angry. Even when I did get angry I sometimes did no more than bite my lip, which in later years tickled my kids to no end. "Kat’s mad -- look at her!” Michael would say. “Kat” is his nickname for me.

     Joe, by contrast, was excitable. Occasionally, I felt that he hit the kids too hard, or too long. In those circumstances I would ask him to ease up.

     Sometimes I kept news of the children's misbehavior from him if I thought that he might react in a way that I did not approve of. I once bought a new dial for the television so he wouldn’t know that one or more of the kids had broken the old dial and, worse yet, hadn’t owned up to the deed. In that situation, his method would have been to line up the kids and spank them all. (It wasn’t until years later that Rebbie confessed that she and Jackie had been the culprits. Jackie had wanted to watch a sports event, while Rebbie insisted on a “fantastic love movie,” and they kept turning the dial until it broke.)

     I also strongly disapproved of one other method of Joe’s: scaring the children to make a point. More than once Joe donned a Halloween mask and climbed through the open window in the boys’ room as they were playing. Each time the kids thought Joe was a burglar and ran screaming into the living room.

     “Joe, how can you scare the kids like that!” I’d exclaim.

     “Kate, I’ve told you and the boys time and again to keep your windows locked at night,” he’d reply. “I was just letting you know how easy it is for someone to break into our house. Next time it might be someone else.”

     (Even if Joe was sincerely trying to make a point, the fact is that he did get a kick out of giving people a start, including his wife. He wasn’t above ducking into the mop closet and grabbing my hand when I reached in for the mop. “Joseph, you make me sick when you do that!” I’d exclaim.)

     Joe was tough on the kids in other ways. He decreed that our two oldest children, Rebbie and Jackie, couldn’t date; and he made it hard for the children to stay home on a school day. There were times when one of the children would complain, “I’m sick and I don’t want to go to school.”

     Joe would reply, “Bring out the castor oil.”

     And if the children insisted on staying home, he would make the kid take it.

     Years later, Jermaine would confess to me, “Mother, many a day I went to school sick because I just didn’t want to drink that castor oil.”

     I’m not going to pretend that Joe’s child-rearing techniques and strong-arm ways were popular with the kids. To this day there is disagreement among the children regarding Joe’s methods.

     MARLON: I don’t think there’s a need for spanking. I believe in firm talk instead. It’s that moment of hurt you inflict on a kid that changes his mind.

     In the majority of families in our neighborhood, the kids got beat; it was the system. You’d be outside playing with your friends and, if something wasn’t done, here would come your father with a belt. Bop, bop, bop. You’d run into your house crying, and your friends would be laughing. The next day it would be their turn, and you’d be the one doing the laughing.

     However, the majority of my kids have come to understand or even approve of Joe’s disciplinary methods.

     JERMAINE: I am glad our father disciplined us the way he did. The reason we turned out the way we did is because my mother showed us all the love, while my father kept us in line. If we had gotten only love, we would have been spoilt, and we would probably have gotten into trouble by stealing or doing something else illegal, because we would have been used to getting everything we wanted.

     JACKIE: Yes, my father was strict, but I don’t believe he was too strict. Raising six boys in Gary, how could he be too strict?

     It’s interesting that the media doesn’t seem interested in knowing about the nice things my father did for us, like taking my brothers and me camping and fishing on the weekends.

     TITO: Or on Saturdays taking out his boxing gloves and giving us and some of our neighbor friends boxing lessons in the front yard. “You boys have to be able to defend yourselves,” he’d tell us.

     REBBIE: Or showing us in various little ways that he loved us, such as by coming home from work with a big bag of doughnuts when he worked the swing shift. Or by making ice cream for us. Before it got too polluted in Gary, he’d go outside and scoop up the fresh snow to make it with.

     TITO: For what he wound up doing for my life, I think my father is one of the greatest men in the world -- no matter how he did it. I’m happy now. Life is not just your childhood.

     As committed as Joe and I were to raising our kids the right way and watching out for their safety, we knew that we couldn’t fully insulate them from the dangers in Gary. The knowledge that one or more of them might become an innocent victim of a violent crime ate at us. Finally in 1960 we decided to move.

     But where to go? Our California dream was still alive, but we didn’t have the money to finance a scouting trip there.

     Eventually, we settled on Seattle. We’d heard how beautiful the city was, and the sister of a friend offered to put us up while we looked for jobs.

     I told my mother of our plans, and she agreed to stay with the children while we were away.

     Our good-byes to our children were upbeat. I heard later that tears didn’t start rolling down their cheeks until we were out the door.

     I had a few tears myself when Joe and I were on the road. I had never been separated from my kids before and I hated to leave them. But I was happy, too, knowing that our life in Gary was drawing to an end.

     Fifty miles out of Gary, however, our Buick started acting up, and Joe had to pull over to the side of the road.

     “We blew an oil gasket,” he announced grimly after peering under the hood. “I’m sorry, we’re going to have to turn back.”

     I was stunned. “I knew it was too good to be true that we were going to Seattle,” I said.

     Joe was able to get us home in the Buick. When the kids saw us pull into the driveway, they came running out of the house. They were overjoyed that we'd returned.

     We didn’t have the money to fix the Buick. “Well we’ll just stay in Gary. It’s not the time to move,” we said.

     But the following year wasn’t the time, either -- we just couldn’t muster the energy. Nor the next year. Nor the year after that. In fact, it wasn’t until the Jackson Five was on the road to success in 1969 that we were finally on the road out of Gary.

     Looking back, I’m glad we stayed, crime worries and all. Had we gone through with our move, the boys wouldn’t have sung around the house as much as they did because it would have been safe for them to play outside. Joe and I wouldn’t have been as motivated to develop their budding talent as singers and dancers because we would have gotten better jobs. And we wouldn’t have met the people who helped my boys launch their career.